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BMX-routing supports this year's "Wireless Battle of the Mesh - Building Community Networks for Fun and Non-Profit".

The event aims to bring together people from across the globe who are interested in community networks, including wireless mesh network technologies, fiber infrastructure, Do-It-Yourself Internet Access Providers, and more generally how to create and maintain a thriving community of people involved in building their own networks.

We envision 7 days full of expert presentations, practical workshops, late-night hacking sessions, and fruitful discussions: whether you are a mesh networking enthusiast, community networking activist, protocol developer, or have an interest in networking in general, come and join the event!

Thanks to generous sponsors, the battlemesh is free of charge and open for all, and every year the local organization team strives to keep participation costs low by negotiating deals for accommodation and food.

This year, the event will take place from Monday 8th to Sunday 14th of July, 2019 in Saint-Denis (Paris), France. The event is locally organized.Check out continuously updated information about the event at https://www.battlemesh.org/BattleMeshV12

BMX-routing endorses and supports "Wireless Battle of the Mesh - Building Community Networks for Fun and Non-Profit" not only for the efforts made by its community to advance the field of wireless mesh networking and foster the development of grass-roots community networks, but for their contribution to digital freedom rights movement, empowerment of peoples tech/net/media competency and a free and open civil society.

The objective of this project is to combine the current cryptographic stack of BMX7 with the one used by WireGuard. The process via which this will be achieved will be iterative; meaning that first binary calls from bmx7 to userland WG will be introduced, afterwards the efforts will be centered in the creation of a new plugin implementing WireGuard routing by using part of the existing cryptographic primitives and at last the effort to combine the tunnel plugin with the WG one.

BMX7 offers plugins which are used for the distribution of small files, settings up tunnels or offer stats of the network structure. Currently the connection between a client node and the gateway are established via IPIP (IPv4/6 over IPv6), which is unencrypted and therefore possibly readable by attackers. As mesh networks usually operate on unencrypted wireless connections, the attack vector is considerably big.

The detail that distinguishes our approach’s difficulty from hard to medium is cryptographic keys. It’s simpler to announce new public keys for WireGuard and have a separate plugin than replacing the existing BMX7 keys to allow signing of descriptive updates and encryption of traffic.

BMX-routing project endorses "Mesh is in the air" - this year mesh up of the "Wireless Battle of the Mesh (WBMv11)" and "Wireless Community Weekend (WCW18)".

We keep the approach to test the performance of different routing protocols for ad-hoc networks and combine it with the celebration of the 15th anniversary of the yearly Freifunk community get together. The mix becomes a global gathering of wifi tech experts, mesh developers and community networkers that join the event to hack, test, discuss, explain, learn and barbecue at c-base, Berlins famous hacker-space-station.

If you are a mesh networking enthusiast, community activist, have an interest in wifi or dynamic routing protocols, you can't miss this event! So check out our continuously updated information about the event at Wireless Meshup

The BattleMesh is free of charge and open for all, every year we strive to keep participation costs low by negotiating deals for accommodation and food.

This year the event will take place from Monday 7th to Sunday 13th of May, 2018 in Berlin, Germany. The event is locally organized by Freifunk , Germany's community wireless network.

We endorse and support "Mesh is in the air" not only for the efforts made by its community to advance the field of wireless mesh networking and foster the development of grass-roots community networks, but for their contribution to digital freedom rights movement, humanitarian aid, empowerment of peoples tech/net/media competency and a free and open civil society.

BMX-routing team will support the event by:

Promoting the event

Inviting and hosting community activists during the event

Presenting overview and insight on BMX7 advances, deployments, and experiences

Introduce ongoing and upcoming projects

Contribute to experimentation with hardware, test configuration and analysis

Citing its website, "The LEDE project is founded as a spin-off of the OpenWrt project and shares many of the same goals. We are building an embedded Linux distribution that makes it easy for developers, system administrators or other Linux enthusiasts to build and customize software for embedded devices, especially wireless routers."

We wish huge success to the LEDE project and will consider it the new default OS environment for embedded devices running bmx6 and bmx7.

The "Wireless Battle of the Mesh" is an event that aims to bring together people from across the globe to discuss and test advances, features and performance of different tools and technology for mesh networking!

Version 9 of the event will take place from 1st to 7th of May 2016 in Porto/Portugal

The BMX6 team endorses and supports the Battle of the Mesh v9 because of the efforts made by its community to advance the field of wireless and community mesh networking and foster the development of grass-roots DIY networks.

The BMX6 project will support the event by:

report about advances of our protocol and it's usage in communities

help to set up the protocol, test cases, and analyse measurement results

coming to the event and convince others to do the same

Many other communities endorse and support the Wireless Battle of The Mesh, an up to date list of the endorsers of the Battlemesh v9 can be found at the main Battlemesh website: http://battlemesh.org/BattleMeshV9 .

Abstract:Routing in open and decentralized networks relies on cooperation despite the participation of unknown nodes and node administrators pursuing heterogeneous trust and security goals. Living use cases for such environments are given by community-mesh networks due to their open structure and decentralized management and ownership. However, despite many active work in the field of routing security for mesh and MANET networks, practical solutions enabling a secured but decentralized trust management are still missing, leaving nowadays existing community networks vulnerable to various attacks and seriously challenged by the obligation to find consensus on the trustability of participants within an increasing user size and diversity. This work presents the design, implementation and analysis of a routing protocol that enables cryptographically secured negotiation and establishment of concurrent and individually-trusted routing topologies for infrastructure-less networks without relying on any central management.Benchmarking results, based on our initial implementation and tested on real and very cheap (10 Euro, Linux SoC) embedded routers, quantify the scalability of our approach supporting networks with hundreds of nodes and despite being based on supposedly CPU-expensive asymmetric cryptography.

Abstract:In recent years, we have witnessed the exponential growth of wireless community networks as a response to the clear necessity of Internet access for participation in society. For wireless mesh networks that can scale up to thousands of nodes, which are owned and managed in a decentralized way, it is imperative for their survival to provide the network with self-management mechanisms that reduce the requirements of human intervention and technological knowledge in the operation of a community network. In this paper, we focus on one important self-management mechanism, routing, and we study the scalability, performance, and stability of three proactive mesh routing protocols: BMX6, OLSR, and Babel. We study different metrics on an emulation framework and on the W-ILab.T testbed at iMinds, making the most of the two worlds. Emulation allows us to have more control over the topology and more systematically repeat the experiments, whereas a testbed provides a realistic wireless medium and more reliable measurements, especially in terms of interference and CPU consumption. Results show the relative merits, costs, and limitations of the three protocols.

This article discusses the Network Characterization Daemon (NCD), a piece of software that provides users of Community Mesh Networks (CMNs) with an interactive tool to monitor, evaluate and fine-tune their network nodes.

First, CMNs are introduced as a particular case of Community Networks (CNs), and their participation challenges are analysed. The NCD is then discussed as a novel solution that provides CMN end users with mechanisms to assess network performance and improve their quality of experience by modifying their devices’ network configuration. The relation of the NCD with Quick Mesh Project (qMp) and the BatMan-eXperimental version 6 (BMX6) routing protocol is detailed as part of the social and technological context.

The NCD also provides an experimentation framework to evaluate network performance in real-life CMNs. The latter part of this article covers the experiments performed using the NCD to assess network performance (in terms of path selection, Round-Trip Time (RTT), etc.) when different BMX6 routing policies are applied. The results show how, under different traffic conditions (e.g. distinct packet sizes), using specific routing policies leads to an improvement in network performance.

Finally, the integration of the NCD in qMp is discussed, in order to ensure its long-term sustainability.